 This show was brought to you by these lovely people. Hey there you lovely NPR enthusiast. We have a fancy normal show this time, which you will discover in a bit. The highlights, malt3d.com is the place you want to go. The journey to reach perfect tune shading and Pokemon. Welcome to the BNPR show, a celebration of stylized rendering. Before we embark on the journey to create new NeuroPaths, let's enjoy ourselves with these inspiring artworks. We have new and updated malt documentation at malt3d.com by Miguel Pozo, the lead developer of malt. It has everything you need to know when working with malt from hardware requirements, installation, uninstallation, pipeline configuration, graphs and node reference, and write-ups of everything you can find in malt. So please hit up his Patreon because he's doing a mighty fine job. The pursuit to obtain the perfect tune shading has led us to many discoveries. The latest one, which we have shown in the past BNPR show is using normal data transfer. A version of reality has made at the time of the making of this show, three very comprehensive videos, detailing the thoughts and the workflow aiming toward perfect tune shading. We edit vertex normals to gain that smoother shading, regardless of mesh topology. There are four common methods. One, custom normal applied to the mesh. Two, custom normal live data transfer. Three, baked texture normal or normal map. And four, live normals in the shader, procedural textures. Normal transfer and normal editing are technically the same. Normal transfer is changing normals from another mesh. Normal editing is manually moving the normals to each vertex. Those are custom vertex normals. The geometry node normal transfer setup. The plane, a transfer object, which is wrapped onto a face. The normals from the plane are transferred to the final head. So why the shading problem? It has to do with how the vertex normals are calculated and interpolated. One, all faces are converted into triangles by the GPU, creating extra edges. Two, smooth shading is a linear vertex normal interpolation and it is very simple and very limited. Easy to understand on a sliding edge. It looks like this gradient. The extra vertex will pull the shading to either side. Add another vertex forming a triangle. You will get a smooth gradient going whichever direction. And that's the reason mesh topology changes shading so much. The reason we get messy shading is because smooth shading curvature works by interpolating the vertex normals across the faces. When the faces aren't even, then the interpolation will not be even. Vertex normal data transfer works because the topology is given another value mimicking the mesh where the vertex normal is based on. When the mesh deforms, the shading will also break. Let's see why. Normals are used to add details, but in our case, we're removing details from the uneven mesh. The normals are stored as the differences of the wanted surface shading to the actual geometry. If we deform the mesh, the difference stays consistent and the shading breaks. What we want is the mesh deforming and the shading to re-target to our wanted terminator line. Let's look at the different mappings the normal face transfer has and see how they behave. One, the projected face interpolated mapping. The shape of the source normals matters. Expected behavior when target is inside the source. Unexpected behavior when the target is outside the source because the target's face's normal direction are not hitting the source. When the face normals point in another direction, it will inherit that face normal, which is why the faces inside the eye get shaded weirdly. Projected face interpolated can be used for projecting shading details like a nose shading. Two, the nearest face interpolated mapping. This solves the directional face issue from the projected face interpolation. It may create jagged edges when there is a big gap between the source mesh to the target mesh. Three, the nearest corner types mapping. There are these nearest corner mappings. These are not useful for smooth shading and thus have been omitted from further investigation. Four, the topology mapping. This mapping must have a mesh with identical topology. That means the vertices index must be exactly the same. And thus the only way to ensure that is to duplicate the mesh. Note, the same shape does not mean the same index. Another note, some object modifiers can cause index reordering. Now we need to understand face corners. Face corner data splits the corner of each vertex so that it can store one set of data per corner. One vertex with four edges is four corners and four sets of data and so on. The face corner data is indexed as a loop around the face. This information will be useful later. Split normals or commonly known as custom normal is that of face corner data. This third video solves kind of the issue we've encountered before. Let's solve the air gap problem that causes the jagged for the nearest face interpolation. We can shrink wrap to solve but we end up with a mesh with the same shape of the target along with the cycles dependency problem. To really solve these issues, we must use a chain of meshes to transfer the normals from one to another. In this example, the mappings are from right to left, topology, projected face, interpolation and ends with topology mapping. This is not a fixed solution so please use what works for your mesh. To add detail, we can make changes along the chain. There is a mix node with data transfer but they are not really useful algorithms for normal vector mixing. That said, we need to use a different method to add normal details. The normal transfer from decals, the base setup is easy. We need a nose target mesh separate from the head. We have two source meshes, one for the overall shading which we have seen until now and two for the nose decal. Add two data transfer modifiers and point one to the overall shape source normal and the other pointing to the nose source normal. By the way, this is the workaround method mentioned in the video. We also need to understand object space normal and tangent space normal. The normals in tangent space are like a normal map aka a normal texture. The object space normals are split normals on a mesh. The reason you need to understand the differences is when you need to wrap the head in a more curved shape. The object space will have a shading issue while the tangent normals will work fine. The flat transfer setup. This is the closest method to geometry nodes. The intermediary shape is flat, which is a UV map. It's made using an add-on called text tools that can create a mesh in the shape of the UV. For this to work, we have to have a very clean UV unwrap that fills the whole UV space. The rest of the setup is quite similar to everything we've seen before which is a chain of data transfers. And that is the three parts introduction to normal editing using data transfer. The next parts will build up from this knowledge to create the perfect tune shading. There was a lot shown and introduced here so we don't expect you to be able to digest everything in one go. It took us over a week to digest, summarize, fact check, and present this tutorial segment. So take it slow and make sure you understand every part. Thus, a version of reality also wrote a summary blog post cataloging all the ideas presented here. Please read and digest it thoroughly. Dragon Ball Gohan vs. Episode 8 by Daiya Tomodachi. The teaser this time. Emo just returned from spending one year with Grand Priest Gohan in the hyperbolic time chamber, a.k.a. one day in real time. He gets an unexpected guest. The cliff-hanging plot twist this time, let's just say, makes you want more. Pokemon Legends Celebi. Final trailer by Yasur. We can see so many Pokemons. The aesthetic makes you believe there is a world beyond what you can see in a trailer. Great job. Antarctic Penguin Colors, Episode 3 by Mine Ichinos. Everything made by Mine is always wholesome. A great place to chill, a kind, and safe place. We're going to miss these penguins because this is the final episode. And now we're afraid to inform you that this is the end of this show. We hope we didn't damage your brains by nerding out so much about normals. But as always, you can find everything shown here and more hint in the show notes. Now for the most important part. This show is only made possible by these kind-hearted people. Please think them kindly. And before we go, one final question. Do you know other methods to create the perfect tune shading?